The Theatre

George Jean Nathan

BEDSIDE CRITICISM.—In the concluding months of the season, it was evident that

a kind of critical Christian Science had seized the reviewers. Doubtless feeling their hearts touched by the pathetic condition of the drama, they cheerfully set about making the best of things, affecting a very allegro bedside manner and assuring the patient that nothing was in the least wrong with it and that it only thought something was. As a consequence, we were entertained by various mortally ill patients, together with several suffering from such minor ailments as leprosy, all being magnanimously reassured in the public prints that they were in the prime of life and ready for big, rowdy parties, with wine.

One of the patients thus affably lied to was George O'Neil's American Dream,

produced by the Guild. A few of the critical doctors bluntly told it the truth as to its condition, but the majority made out that it was in very commendable health and a high testimonial to the rich blood of the theatrical family. As a gratuitous consultant in cases like these—I have found that they occur at intervals of every five or six years when criticism becomes obsessed by the idea that the way to help the ailing drama is to pretend that absolutely nothing is the matter with it and that everything is tip-top—it pains me to inform the relatives that Mr. O'Neil's play is a very sick specimen, and one altogether too feeble in every particular to have ventured into the draughts of the proscenium arch. As unveiled to Guild audiences, the exhibit sought to show, in three short plays, what happened in as many American households in 1650, 1849 and 1933. What happened was so fuddled and confused that audiences had a time of it trying to deduce just what the author was driving at. At one moment, it seemed to be his purpose to show the rebellion of the individual in the three periods in question; at another, it appeared that he was trying to indicate the decline and corruption of the idealistic American tradition; at still another, one got the idea that what he was up to was an effort to depict the gradual disintegration of the once resolute and proud American; and at still another, it seemed that his theme was the futility of rebellion against prevailing forces.

• In this balmy juncture, it was more or less natural for an osteopathic critic to speculate on O'Neil's manuscript and on what had occurred to it on its way to theatrical revealment. The aforesaid critic, exercising his staff of secret agents, was not long in arriving at the facts. He discovered that, as originally conceived, written and delivered to the Guild, the play had been written the other way around, that is, the first act had been laid in 1933, the second in 1849 and the third and final act in 1650—and that the Guild, for reasons best known to itself, had produced it backwards! This accounted for a share of the confusion. But not for all. Further investigation disclosed the news that the second act of the play, of which it was almost impossible to make head or tail, had been altered and cut to such an extent that what was finally disclosed on the stage resembled the original about as closely as Design for Living resembles The Sign of the Cross.

The act that the Guild audiences were privileged to behold was a senseless hash about a clergyman who took a man's wife under his spiritual wing when the husband announced his intention of deserting the family and going West to seek his fortune. Try as the critic would, he had a devil of a time figuring out just what all this had to do with the main current of the author's thesis —whatever that thesis was—and just how it fitted in with any theoretical conception of the O'Neil theme. What had happened, it was discovered, was the complete elimination from the act of its reason for being. As written originally, the author tried to show the hypnotic influence of the posturing clergyman over the wife and, through a more or less hypocritical intonation of the "Song of Solomon," his playing upon the wife's sexual strings and his seduction of her. thus giving some faint point to the husband's challenge and departure. With all this deleted from the act, what remained was little more than a vaudeville Henry Arthur Jones skit, utterly meaningless.

There were, it was also found, other such puzzling alterations. The result, plainly enough, was a botch. 1 do not, obviously, mean to insist that O'Neil's play, in its pristine form, was anything to light Chinese lanterns about, but at any rate it seems a pretty fair guess that, whatever it was like, it was a better job than the abortion disclosed to the Guild customers.

A SECOND SPECIMEN.—Sidney Howard's Alien Corn, manufactured as a vehicle for Miss Katharine Cornell, was sympathetically touted as something in the A-l class, getting such press notices as are customarily reserved for something very high-toned in the way of dramatic art. A calm scrutiny of it revealed it to be simply a workmanlike and rather suavely executed package of boxoffice hokum, quite devoid of merit other than that associated with mazuma amour, which in these days is, after all, probably something not to be too loftily sniffed at.

Mr. Howard, toying with the box-office's leg, has fallen hack on the ancient whiffle involving an artiste in surroundings alien and discommodious and her eventual decision to call it a day and vamoose to a milieu more congenial. The scene in this instance is a Middle-Western tank college and the artiste is a pianist who, following the rules of hokum drama for the last thirty or forty years, finds that the cowy folk on the campus do not understand her, leading her to a great deal of agonized face-making and evidences of intestinal disorder and causing her, as noted, finally to proclaim that she is off to Alt Wien where, presumably, all the inhabitants are full of soul and deep comprehension when it comes to piano playing.

Mr. Howard writes rather more adroitly than most of the hacks who usually busy themselves with themes of this particular species, and certain passages of his play are not without a superficial glitter, like nickel candy wrapped in gilt foil. Yet there remains something a little distasteful, even in his periodically smooth writing, about this boobish American theatrical theory that an artist is unable to find any trace of understanding and sympathy in America and that, on the contrary, Europe is one big warm-hearted and comprehending glow in the presence of all artistic aspiration. One had imagined that the subject was long since material for a comic revue skit; to find it offered seriously at this late date by a writer of Mr. Howard's experience is a matter for some nose-scratching.

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The success enjoyed by the exhibition lias been due to Mr. Guthrie McClintic's expert stage direction and, above all, to Miss Cornell's performance of the role of Elsa Brandt. Although she causes some critical trepidation in the earlier portion of the evening by acting the role with that excessive lugubriousness associated in the old stock-company histrionic mind with the artistic temperament—she affects a mien suggestive of being simultaneously with child by at least four Paderewskis, all of whom have cruelly deserted her in her hour of pain for Helen Morgan—she gradually masters herself and for the rest of the evening offers a telling, impressive and quite glamorous performance. She is a very talented young woman, this Cornell. One only hopes for her own sake that she will dismiss from her acting technique the shoddy device—indulged in by her, as I have recorded. in the early stages of the present exhibition—of playing certain completely negligible passages and scenes with an air of importance so classic and grave that it would be slightly ridiculous even were her materials two or three times better.

MORE CRITICAL SALVE.—The critical goodwill continued to extend itself in the instance of Forsaking All Others, a comedy by the Messrs. Roberts and Cavett. Despite the circumstance that all anyone else could discern in it was a rickety little play bolstered up here and there with some mildly saucy remarks, the press came valiantly to the rescue of the state of the drama by proclaiming it just a shade less superbissimo than something by Richard Brinsley Sheridan. What it was, unless I place too offensive a reliance upon my own opinion in such matters, was a measly attempt to duplicate the kind of comedy that Clare Kummer used to manoeuvre so happily and to conceal its inability to do so by filling in the gaps with that strained and studied form of conversational give-andtake that passes in the minds of flatheads for sparkling repartee. One of the curses of present-day American playwriting is the desperate effort of playwrights without wit to be witty. Every now and then a comedy that might be moderately entertaining if its author allowed himself to write it simply and directly turns out to be a miserable earache because of his insistent belief that it is necessary for him to interrupt every other line of its dialogue with something, however irrelevant, that he considers ultra snappy. It is almost impossible to go to the theatre these days and see a comedy in which—for no other reason than that the author imagines it is publicly demanded of him that he be a fellow of rich mots—the characters do not resolve themselves into so many vaudeville brother and sister acts, minus only the customary clog dancing.

The stellar figure in Forsaking All Others is Miss Tallulah Bankhead who, along with the play itself, got such notices from the reviewers as have not been read hereabouts since the late Alan Dale caught one of Charmion's gaily tossed rosebud garters and mistook it for great histrionic fecundity. This Miss Bankhead, it seems to me. is simply another in the long procession of performers who, though they may hardly with any precision be described as actresses, are yet currently accepted and admired above many of their sisters with real acting talent. I have viewed Miss Bankhead now in some half dozen exhibitions here and abroad and though in none of them did she offer anything that I, for one, was brought up to regard as acting, her audiences nevertheless appeared to be enchanted by her. In London, on one occasion, indeed, it was all the house management could do to keep the audience's enthusiasm within police bounds when she came out on the stage at one point in the progress of a pretty dreadful comedv and removed her Gandhi panties. At least six women fainted in ecstasy over the spectacle of triumphant art. Just what the explanation is, I do not know and as yet have not inquired. Perhaps the public is tired of competent actresses and wants merely eccentric personalities, which would account, in a way, for the success of many of the moving picture girls. And then, perhaps it is something altogether different.

DAVISIANA.—A Saturday Night was still another potboiler out of the Owen Davis kitchen. Evidently believing that the public was fed up with plays in which the heroines' roles were played by men and in which it was difficult to tell if the leading woman had showed up that night or if it was her uncle who was substituting for her, Mr. Davis set himself to the confection of a play dealing with what are alluded to as "normal, everyday people". Now, plays dealing with normal, everyday people may be very interesting and amusing plays—The First Year, for an example,—or they may be just about twice as tiresome as the late lot of plays dealing with abnormality. Mr. Davis' play fell into the second group. Although the world has moved, Mr. Davis, at least in his capacity as a writer of plays, seems to have remained resolutely rooted to the 1890's. What he believes to be normal, everyday people are merely the normal, everyday stock figures of the drama of yesteryear, with as little present-day life and vitality as so many old Biograph films.

From the venerable second act situation in which the family works itself up into a wild and terror-stricken agony over the danger to its young daughter's chastity—she has gone out for the evening, against the family's wishes, with a dubious, fashionable fellowabout-town, to the kind of homely humor implicit in the remark that it was foolish to give mother a bottle of perfume for her birthday as she takes baths anyway, Mr. Davis' dramatic pen drips with the. stage's stalest inks. Of freshness and imagination there is not a trace. Like the poppings of a cuckoo out of an old stock company storehouse clock, the Davis stage still goes in for the old friend of the family who worships the wife and would give his all to spare her any pain or trouble; the child who is injured in an accident and carried into the scene just as the mother, all agog, is preparing at long last for one happy night out with her hard-working husband; the young daughter who challengingly allows that she is going to lead her own life and who, just as everybody fears the worst, comes back home in drunken contrition; the snooty young jackanapes in evening clothes who fetches the young daughter momentarily from the plain, serious and noble youth in a sack suit; the maid servant who appropriates a bright red silk dress in order to step out for the night; and the episode in which a character heartlessly tears up the little sketches that another has patiently and humbly slaved over and taken great pride in.

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ANOTHER.—One Sunday Afternoon, by James Hagan, was another exhibit that sought to substitute simple, honest and normal sentiment for the more complex cargoes of Stekelism that have lately been dumped on the local Cunard and White Star docks. Mr. Hagan, unlike Mr. Davis, has a truth of feeling and an honesty of emotional observation that periodically give his little play an air of genuineness and reality. His story of the courting of two small town belles in the old beer-garden days is told by a man who seems to have seen the story with his own eyes and felt it with his own heart, and who, in the telling, hasn't unduly worried himself over what a playwright like Davis would consider theatrical effectiveness. True enough, this has not worked out entirely for the best, as Hagan's play every now and again misses the necessary quality of theatrical galvanism. But, even so, it is more commendable stuff than the more expert artificiality of such things as A Saturday Night. Its chief weakness lies in its commonplaceness of expression. Almost everything is in it but beauty of the written word. What eloquence it has lies entirely between its spoken lines.

ANDERSON'S LATEST.—It has been my pretty general experience in the theatre that, when the programme indicates that the evening's drama is to be laid for the major part at a long table in a committee room, assembly hall or council chamber, one may properly fear the worst. Of the numerous plays containing as their principal item of furniture a twentyfoot conference table, I have difficulty in recalling one that was all it should have been. Mr. Maxwell Anderson's Both Your Houses falls into the category of such plays and is duly not all that it might be. yet it is more entertaining than most.

Taking as his springboard the corruption of Congress, particularly in the direction of its hoggish appropriation committees, Anderson takes the rust off an obvious grease-paint dramatic handling of his theme with frequent touches of acute and salty humor. Through the exercise of this humor, he makes one oblivious of such stale basic theatrical materials as the eager young idealist set upon cleaning up a political ring—familiar to theatregoers since the long ago days of The Man of the Hour, such equally stereotyped devices as the crafty old political dog who wraps a friendly arm around the young innocent's shoulder and imparts to him various slivers of homely wisdom—familiar since the days of The Gentleman from Mississippi, and such shameless hokum as the wise and breezy young woman secretary who, when the young hero seems doomed to be licked, throws her hat into the ring, consigns her old crooked employers to the devil, and announces that she is henceforth on his side and is going to see him through.

In addition to his alleviating humor, Anderson has contrived a firstrate character in the person of Solomon Fitzmaurice, a guzzling old political charlatan completely privy to himself and wholly devoid of hypocrisy. The role is massaged with an eminent drollery by Walter C. Kelly, who has been doing the "Virginia Judge" act in vaudeville for thirty years or more. A young actor named Strudwick is also superior to most of his tribe in the role of the young reformer. And Worthington Miner, hired by the Theatre Guild to produce the exhibit, has done much to impart variety and a sense of some life to what might easily have been simply another monotonous long-table theatrical session.

FOOTNOTES.—Strike Me Pink, the new Brown-Henderson musical show, had everything in it, including Jimmy Durante, but good material. The Lady Refuses, by Saxon Kling, was dreadful junk. Our Wife, by Lillian Day and Lyon Mearson, was also junk. Lone Valley, by Sophie Treadwell, contained nothing to beguile your professor. Run, Little Chi/lun!, a Negro folk play by Hall Johnson, offered two scenes of considerable dramatic force. Several years ago, before we got too used to such exhibits, it would doubtless have created something of a stir. Three Cornered Moon, by Gertrude Tonkonogy, was a first effort whose confused planning and lack of single direction constantly tripped up what one guessed to be its author's basic intention. Accorded a highly favorable critical press, 1 failed to bamboozle myself into seeing anything in it. Masks and Faces, by A. J. Minor, was the worst kind of drivel. Far Away Horses, by the MM. Birmingham and Emery, an attempt at an American-Irish comedy, was obstreperous mediocrity.